Poison Pizza Banned

An eccentric Swiss chef has been ordered to stop selling his latest creation, Poison Pizza.

Ismail Ertekin had been selling the pizzas, topped with a smorgasbord of poisons from spiders, scorpions and snakes, at his Avanto restaurant in Zurich, but health officials have stepped in to outlaw them.

Ertekin claimed that "they were really popular, especially with people who have a phobia of spiders or snakes. They used the pizza as a way to get over their fears."

Unfortunately for him, the poisons are classified as medicinal products rather than foodstuffs, and were therefore not allowed to be an ingredient in food.

"Preservatives in foods are much more damaging than my poison pizzas," he insisted, and indeed there were only tiny amounts, from homeopathic remedies, actually used.

The Poison Pizza followed in the footsteps of Erktein's previous creation, the Gold Pizza, topped with real flakes of gold; this latest pizza apparently had a little more bite to it though.